BrewDog co-founder Martin Dickie has revealed he originally wanted to create an eco-brewery in 2012.
The business bought land near Aberdeen Airport, but he and chief executive James Watt realised the cost of powering and getting water to the site was too much, so had to look elsewhere and eventually found the plot near Ellon that now houses its headquarters.
He said: “We found a great site at the outskirts of Aberdeen airport - a seven acre site - we were able to get it at a great price, as my uncle was a farmer there and sold us a field at agricultural rates.
“The problem was it was on green belt land, so we just couldn't build there - we put a proposal to Aberdeenshire Council to get that changed to allow us to build an environmentally-friendly brewery and amazingly we got planning permission to do it.
“Unfortunately for us the cost of getting water to the site made it impossible because it was in the middle of nowhere.”
The site had no utilities and the nearest electricity supply was two kilometres away. Dickie estimates that the cost to get the site serviced was between £5m and £7m - at a time when the brewer’s whole budget was £3.5m.
Thankfully the Ellon site - where its Dog Tap bar sits today - was available. “It wasn’t this all-singing, all-dancing eco-brewery, but it was the best we could do at the time.”
Dickie hopes to cut water usage at Ellon to less than two parts of water to every pint of beer through its new bio-energy plant.
The £12m green gas plant should power the production of more than 176 million pints of beer a year and help the company cut 7,500 tonnes of carbon emissions every year while running at full capacity.
The company is planning to use the surplus bio-methane created through its anaerobic digester to fuel delivery vehicles and decarbonise the national grid.
BrewDog has already reduced the volume of water it takes to make its beer by more than 50%, but there is still waste created by the brewing process.
The anaerobic digester aims to help BrewDog recycle most of the 200 million litres of wastewater produced every year in the beer-making process, as well as generating bio-methane to power the brewery’s boilers.
The plant combines the wastewater with spent yeast and hops from the brewing process to be “digested” by bacteria to make bio-methane. BrewDog also plans to use the carbon dioxide created by the digester to carbonate its beer.
When fully operational, the digester should create around 200 cubic metres of bio-methane per hour – equivalent to around 23,000 MegaWatt hours (MWh) of energy per year - and enough to heat more than 1,500 homes.
The facility forms the centrepiece of BrewDog’s £50m investment plans to slash carbon emissions per hectolitre of beer by 35%, versus its baseline in 2019.
Sarah Warman, BrewDog’s director of sustainability, said: “Our ambition is nothing short of making BrewDog beer the most planet-friendly beer on Earth, and we’ve taken giant strides towards that goal with our new bio-energy plant.
“Our number one sustainability goal is to reduce emissions, and we want to lead the way for the entire brewing industry.”
Meanwhile, BrewDog’s Australian brewery in Brisbane generates 16 MWh of energy a month through solar panels on its roof, and the company’s US brewery in Columbus is set to follow suit with its own solar power plans to drive down emissions.
The company’s new canning plant - capable of packing 72,000 cans an hour - will cut emissions as the carbon footprint of canned beer is 35% lower than bottled beer.
BrewDog’s goal is to make sure that all its cans are made from 100% recycled aluminium.
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